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NEW COLD WARS: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West
Author: David E Sanger with Mary K Brooks
Publisher: Crown
Pages: 511
Price: $33
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In recent years, geopolitical upheaval and the return of great-power competition have brought a fascinating revival of first-order questions: How does deterrence work? Does economic interdependence make countries less likely to fight? Does rising prosperity force authoritarian regimes to reform?
David E Sanger’s New Cold Wars, written with his long-time researcher Mary K Brooks, tells the story of how those abstract debates have led to real-world consequences. Sanger, a veteran reporter for The New York Times who is at home in the arcane world of strategic studies, has crafted a cogent, revealing account of how a generation of American officials have grappled with dangerous developments in the post-Cold War era — the rise of an enduringly authoritarian China, the return of state-on-state conflict in Europe — that have produced a geopolitical mash-up of old and new.
Take the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “Trench warfare!” Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said to Sanger about six months into the war. “For a while we thought this would be a cyber war. Then we thought it was looking like an old-fashioned, World War II tank war. And then, there are days when I thought they are fighting [expletive] World War I.” As Sanger writes: “Milley had put his finger on one of the most unsettling features of the new geopolitical era: It is part 1914, part 1941 and part 2022. All at once.”
Despite the book’s title, then, what Sanger depicts is less reminiscent of the Cold War than of earlier phases of geopolitical competition, in which interests mattered far more than ideology and the players were interdependent rather than split
into blocs.
Sanger begins his tale with the crumbling of the so-called Washington Consensus that took hold in the 1990s: the belief that economic globalisation and the spread of free markets would foster stability and secure American dominance of a “rules-based” international order.
Back then, Bill Clinton argued that China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and the rise of the World Wide Web would spur the country’s democratisation. George W Bush thought that sharing an enemy in the war on terrorism might lure Vladimir Putin closer to the West, even as Nato expanded to Russia’s borders. But “just about every assumption across different administrations was wrong,” an unnamed advisor to President Biden admits. “I was as guilty as anyone else.”
It’s a rare anonymous quote in a book built on extensive on-the-record interviews with an ensemble cast of foreign-policy professionals narrating their own efforts to adjust as reality ceased to conform to conventional expectations.
Consider Kurt Campbell, a veteran Asia hand and an early sceptic of the decades-long elite consensus that aiding China’s economic growth and enmeshing it in the US-led world order was, as he puts it, “almost a mystical thing that must be sustained”. Campbell served in the Clinton and Obama administrations; over time, he came to advocate a more aggressive approach to China. But his arguments went largely unheeded — until, strangely enough, the Trump era.
One theme that emerges in New Cold Wars is the surprising continuity between the Trump and Biden administrations when it comes to China. With Campbell as a top advisor on China, Biden has largely kept in place Donald Trump’s trade-war tariffs on Chinese goods, amped up Trump-era export restrictions to slow China’s technological progress and talked tough on Taiwan. Ironically, Sanger writes, “a handful of Trump’s aides laid the foundation for one of the signature efforts of the Biden administration”.
Sanger also deftly illustrates the challenges of deterrence. In the fall of 2022, at the peak of American alarm about Putin’s nuclear brinkmanship in Ukraine, Lloyd Austin, the US secretary of defence, warned his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, that if the Russians used a tactical nuclear weapon, the United States would directly intervene and destroy, as one official recalls to Sanger, “what is left of your military in Ukraine”.
Shoigu bristled, but the warning seemed to work. There has, of course, been no nuclear strike and, as a Biden aide points out to Sanger, no Russian attacks on any of the bases in Poland that the United States uses to deliver weapons to Ukraine. On the other hand, “it was impossible to know whether Putin believed the threat”, Sanger writes. And perhaps with
good reason: Some Biden aides admit to Sanger that they were unsure if the US President would truly make good on it.
In this mostly laudatory account of Biden’s foreign policy, the Gaza war is one area in which Sanger finds fault. Biden’s hesitancy to use American leverage to restrain Israel “looked and felt like a failure of clear leadership”, he writes.
As Sanger makes clear, with America no longer an unchallenged hegemon, the fate of the US-led order rests more than ever on the ideas, beliefs and emotions of people far outside the Beltway. One finishes this book wishing for equally comprehensive portraits of the view from elsewhere, especially Moscow and Beijing.
Don’t hold your breath, though: The American foreign policy establishment has erred many times, but the authoritarians it confronts (and the ones it coddles) would never allow a reporter like Sanger to peer inside their systems and reveal what he finds.
The reviewer is an executive editor of Foreign Affairs ©2024 The New York Times News Service
